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Illumos to drop SPARC Support

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Re: Illumos to drop SPARC Support

#101

Post by mixmastamyk »

bcantrill wrote: post #92
tptacek wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with this jails/zones stuff is that I don't know anyone who seriously trusts jails and zones for real multitenant workloads anyways. The dealbreaker problem remains a shared kernel attack surface between tenants. It's one thing to propose that Zones are better than namespaces (they probably are), but another thing to cross the threshold where the distinction is meaningful in practice.

At Joyent, we deployed public-facing multitenant workloads based on zones (and before that, jails) for many years. We seriously trusted it -- and had serious customers who seriously depended on it. So, now you know someone!

Security requirements (and awareness) have increased over the years, have they not?

Re: Illumos to drop SPARC Support

#102

Post by unixhero »

bcantrill wrote: post #92
tptacek wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with this jails/zones stuff is that I don't know anyone who seriously trusts jails and zones for real multitenant workloads anyways. The dealbreaker problem remains a shared kernel attack surface between tenants. It's one thing to propose that Zones are better than namespaces (they probably are), but another thing to cross the threshold where the distinction is meaningful in practice.

At Joyent, we deployed public-facing multitenant workloads based on zones (and before that, jails) for many years. We seriously trusted it -- and had serious customers who seriously depended on it. So, now you know someone!

And needless to say it became a billion dollar business, with a great product.

Re: Illumos to drop SPARC Support

#103

Post by [deleted] »

tptacek wrote: post #86
jsiepkes wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion Linux hasn't caught up. * Namespaces don't come close to FreeBSD jails or Solaris / Illumos Zones. There is a reason Docker hosters put their Docker tenants in different hardware VM's. Because the isolation is too weak. * Due to CDDL and GPL problems ZFS on Linux will always be hard to use making every update cycle like playing Russian roulette. And there are other benefits. Like SMF offers nice service…

The problem with this jails/zones stuff is that I don't know anyone who seriously trusts jails and zones for real multitenant workloads anyways. The dealbreaker problem remains a shared kernel attack surface between tenants. It's one thing to propose that Zones are better than namespaces (they probably are), but another thing to cross the threshold where the distinction is meaningful in practice.

[deleted]

Re: Illumos to drop SPARC Support

#104

Post by ahl »

I have a uniquely soft spot for SPARC, having written and disassembled a bunch of SPARC early in my career. If this is its swan song, I'll take the moment to share some code the takes advantage of the odd (today) delay slot architecture to implement instruction picking:

https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/blob/master/usr/src/...

The trick uses a branch in the delay slot of a jmp--a decidedly unusual construction. At the time I found this to be extremely clever and elegant... but apparently not so clever as to warrant a comment.

Re: Illumos to drop SPARC Support

#105

Post by guardiangod »

nimbius wrote: post #71
wicket wrote: post #32

With Linux having caught up with key Solaris features in recent years (DTrace -> eBPF, Zones -> Namespaces, ZFS -> ZFS on Linux), I always thought that the main reason to use Illumos would be first-class SPARC support. With that now dropped, I'm concerned that Illumos soon become irrelevant. Are there any compelling reasons left to use Illumos, other than being something for those who just want a free Solaris alterna…

>ZFS on Linux its been said in the thread already but this was always a non-starter. Torvalds even said so himself. CDDL was the last poison pill of a dying giant who couldnt pull its foot from the well. What we, er, the linux community, chose instead, was BTRFS. It isnt ZFS, but its made incredible strides. for most use cases, it is a reasonable and working replacement for ZFS.

>What we, er, the linux community, chose instead, was BTRFS.

Isn't that putting politic before technical excellence, something the Linux crowd is proud of? Other than in place volume expansion, there is no technical reason to choose BTRFS over ZFS (for now.)

I don't really see a killer feature from BTRFS that would persuade me to take a chance with it.

Re: Illumos to drop SPARC Support

#106

Post by laumars »

nimbius wrote: post #71
wicket wrote: post #32

With Linux having caught up with key Solaris features in recent years (DTrace -> eBPF, Zones -> Namespaces, ZFS -> ZFS on Linux), I always thought that the main reason to use Illumos would be first-class SPARC support. With that now dropped, I'm concerned that Illumos soon become irrelevant. Are there any compelling reasons left to use Illumos, other than being something for those who just want a free Solaris alterna…

>ZFS on Linux its been said in the thread already but this was always a non-starter. Torvalds even said so himself. CDDL was the last poison pill of a dying giant who couldnt pull its foot from the well. What we, er, the linux community, chose instead, was BTRFS. It isnt ZFS, but its made incredible strides. for most use cases, it is a reasonable and working replacement for ZFS.

> for most use cases, it is a reasonable and working replacement for ZFS.

That is a huuuuge overstatement for the current state of Btrfs. In some specific domains it is a working replacement. But for most domains it still falls far behind ZFS in terms of stability, resiliency or even ease of use.

By all means if you want to use btrfs then go for it. But the favourable comparisons people make when comparing btrfs to ZFS is a combination of wishful thinking and not having really bullied their fs into those extreme edge cases where the cracks begin to show. And frankly I’d rather depend on something that has had those assurances for 10+yrs already than have the hassle of explaining downtime to restore data on production systems.

Re: Illumos to drop SPARC Support

#107

Post by acomjean »

_hyn3 wrote: post #75
nimbius wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>ZFS on Linux its been said in the thread already but this was always a non-starter. Torvalds even said so himself. CDDL was the last poison pill of a dying giant who couldnt pull its foot from the well. What we, er, the linux community, chose instead, was BTRFS. It isnt ZFS, but its made incredible strides. for most use cases, it is a reasonable and working replacement for ZFS.

I lost data and had to restore from 12 hour old backups one too many times with BTRFS. XFS + Ext4 for me from here on out, but that's one of the great things about Linux: lots of choices.

Lamentably, for those of us that just use linux, the lots of choices seem weird and frankly a little scary (Stories of data loss with BTRFS I have heard before.) I use the default Ext4? I think?

But as a believer in open source, I really would love it if the choices we had were so much superior to the proprietary stuff that was out there that it made using an open source OS a no brainer.

Re: Illumos to drop SPARC Support

#108

Post by laumars »

jsiepkes wrote: post #60
wicket wrote: post #32

With Linux having caught up with key Solaris features in recent years (DTrace -> eBPF, Zones -> Namespaces, ZFS -> ZFS on Linux), I always thought that the main reason to use Illumos would be first-class SPARC support. With that now dropped, I'm concerned that Illumos soon become irrelevant. Are there any compelling reasons left to use Illumos, other than being something for those who just want a free Solaris alterna…

In my opinion Linux hasn't caught up. * Namespaces don't come close to FreeBSD jails or Solaris / Illumos Zones. There is a reason Docker hosters put their Docker tenants in different hardware VM's. Because the isolation is too weak. * Due to CDDL and GPL problems ZFS on Linux will always be hard to use making every update cycle like playing Russian roulette. And there are other benefits. Like SMF offers nice service…

> In my opinion Linux hasn't caught up.

I completely agree. I love Linux and it’s easily my preferred desktop OS but when it comes to stuff like ZFS, containerisation and other enterprise features, FreeBSD and Solaris are just more unified and consistent. A lot of it has to do with Linux being a hodgepodge of different contributors resulting in every feature effectively being a 3rd party feature. Which I think is the problem Pottering was trying to solve. And in many ways that’s quite a strength too. But ultimately it boils down to the old Perl mantra of “There's more than one way to do it” and how it’s fun for hackers but FreeBSD et al add the “but sometimes consistency is not a bad thing either” part of the mantra doesn’t too.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_more_than_one_way_...

Re: Illumos to drop SPARC Support

#109

Post by bombcar »

nimbius wrote: post #71
wicket wrote: post #32

With Linux having caught up with key Solaris features in recent years (DTrace -> eBPF, Zones -> Namespaces, ZFS -> ZFS on Linux), I always thought that the main reason to use Illumos would be first-class SPARC support. With that now dropped, I'm concerned that Illumos soon become irrelevant. Are there any compelling reasons left to use Illumos, other than being something for those who just want a free Solaris alterna…

>ZFS on Linux its been said in the thread already but this was always a non-starter. Torvalds even said so himself. CDDL was the last poison pill of a dying giant who couldnt pull its foot from the well. What we, er, the linux community, chose instead, was BTRFS. It isnt ZFS, but its made incredible strides. for most use cases, it is a reasonable and working replacement for ZFS.

The Linux Community is working on BTRFS but if ZFS emerged with a GPLv2 compatible license tomorrow BTRFS would likely be moribund.

Re: Illumos to drop SPARC Support

#110

Post by zepto »

klelatti wrote: post #80
zepto wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they could move away from ARM if the Nvidia purchase happens. The Nvidia purchase is irrelevant to Apple. They have a license that won’t be impacted. The only thing that would make them move away would be a performance bottleneck in the architecture that necessitates a shift.

> Still leaves Apple open to potential Nvidia's changes to the ISA's direction (and the ISA won't stand still). I assume a full fork of the ISA isn't on the cards even for Apple.

> I assume a full fork of the ISA isn't on the cards even for Apple.

Why do you assume this?

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